A Sound Mind
How I Fell in Love with Classical Music (and Decided to Rewrite its Entire History)
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- £9.99
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- £9.99
Publisher Description
'Exhilarating' - Sunday Times
'Funny and moving' - Jarvis Cocker
Music critic and writer Paul Morley weaves together memoir and history in a spiralling tale that establishes classical music as the most rebellious genre of all.
Paul Morley had stopped being surprised by modern pop music and found himself retreating into the sounds of artists he loved when, as an emerging music journalist in the 70s, he wrote for NME. But not wishing to give in to dreary nostalgia, endlessly circling back to the bands he wrote about in the past, he went searching for something new, rare and wondrous – and found it in classical music.
A soaring polemic, a grumpy reflection on modern rock, and a fan's love note, A Sound Mind rejects the idea that classical music is establishment; old; a drag. Instead, the book reveals this genre to be the most exciting and varied in music. A Sound Mind is a multi-layered memoir of Morley's shifting musical tastes, but it is also a compelling history of classical music that reveals the genre's rich and often deviant past – and, hopefully, future.
Like a conductor, Morley weaves together timelines and timeframes in an orchestral narrative that declares the transformative and resilient power of classical music from Bach to Shostakovich, Brahms to Birtwistle, Mozart to Cage, travelling from eighteenth century salons to the modern age of Spotify.
'His passion for centuries of music – both celebrated and obscure – is infectious' - Irish Independent
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
British rock critic and journalist Morley (Words and Music) embraces contemporary classical music at its most outr in this labyrinthine meditation. Morley locates the soul of classical music in a passion for innovation that eclipses now-formulaic pop styles. While he salutes old masters including Mozart as still-relevant revolutionaries, he focuses more on modern compositions that are an arduously acquired tastes, including Luciano Berio's Sequenza V, written in 1966, an atonal trombone solo performed in a clown getup. The book is a grab-bag, jumbling together playlists, loose-limbed thematic essays, reminiscences of studying composition and writing a string quartet at London's Royal Academy of Music, and rambling interviews with such composers as John Adams and Sir Harrison Birtwistle. Morley delivers many perceptive, tunefully written passages, but many more that display the music-criticism sins of overintellectualizing, obscure erudition, and restless hungering for an unheralded avant-garde to champion (Harrison Birtwistle, for instance, "imagined an entirely different history of the string quartet" and "his entire music orbits classical history, but never lands"). Cognoscenti may relish Morley's appreciation of painfully highbrow music, but ordinary classical-music lovers will find most of it a baffling slog.
